A heated legal dispute between a former Spokane County prosecuting attorney who felt he'd been wronged on a real estate deal and one of Spokane's largest commercial real estate companies ended recently with a jury here finding that three company representatives had violated legal and professional standards, but declining to award any monetary damages.

Although the jury rendered its verdict about a month ago, the case isn't dead yet. The former prosecutor, Jim Sweetser, says he hasn't ruled out filing an appeal, and Brian Balch, attorney for the real estate company, now doing business as NAI Black, says he will be asking the court to award his client substantial attorneys' fees and costs.

Formal entry of a judgment based on the verdict, which followed a two-week trial, is expected to occur at a hearing next week in Spokane County Superior Court, and a hearing on post-trial motions is set for the following week.

The dispute stemmed from Sweetser's failed initial attempts in 2006 to purchase an office building at 1020 N. Washington and what he contended were improper "self-dealing" actions by NAI Black executives and agents that he alleged prevented his escalating offers for the building from receiving fair consideration. The 6,200-square-foot building was sold to another bidder, but he was able to buy it a short time later from that new owner for $750,000—$275,000 more than his original offer for it—and his law firm and a number of other attorneys now occupy it.

He contended in his lawsuit filed in November 2006, though, that the defendants breached a fiduciary duty to him, violated the Washington state Consumer Protection Act, and engaged in criminal profiteering by "shopping" prospective property buyers' earnest money agreements to investors, all of which NAI Black vehemently denied.

Listed defendants in the suit included Tomlinson Black Commercial Inc. and several affiliated companies, CEO Dave Black, President Jeff Johnson, and four other Tomlinson Black commercial real estate agents. The real estate enterprise rebranded itself under the NAI Black name about two years ago.

Sweetser claimed in his suit that he made repeated attempts to increase his initial "full price" offer, including to match and beat any competing offers, but eventually was informed that his offers weren't being considered because the seller had settled on another buyer.

The jury found that Dave Black, Johnson, and agent Earl Engle had committed statutory law and professional standard of care violations, but that those violations hadn't harmed Sweetser. Furthermore, it found that none of the defendants had violated the state Consumer Protection Act.

Black says Sweetser's accusations were "absolutely not true," and the only reason the jury found there were violations was that Engle presented an offer by Sweetser to the building's seller verbally, but didn't do so in written form when the seller said he wasn't interested in the offer.

"We would argue that you don't have to present an offer in writing" in that circumstance, Black says. Based on the jury verdict, though, he says, "We now know that even if the seller doesn't want to see it, we should send it to them, anyway." Nevertheless, he says, "I am so proud of our agents involved. They all did the right things."

The length of the case and the trial, and the hefty volume of documents that make up the court file, appeared disproportionate to the comparatively small financial sum at stake, but the acrimony that the suit stirred up was substantial and hasn't died down yet.

"It's not been a fun process," says Sweetser. "I wasn't doing this to make a profit. I was doing this because I believe in integrity in business transactions."

Balch, meanwhile, says, "The reality is you have a company that has never been in this spot. They have never been accused of this."

He asserts the case should never have gone to trial, adding, "We tried hard not to have that happen," but that Sweetser was uninterested in trying to resolve the matter outside of the courtroom.

Black says, "We typically have a posture of if there's a dispute, we try to settle it as early as we can and move on. This is a classic example of an attorney with a prosecutorial mentality. It's a classic example of a guy that didn't get the building he wanted because he made too low of an offer," and then was unhappy with the outcome—a characterization that Sweetser disputes.